Beijing (May 29, Wed): A 22-year-old woman who raised the initial alarm about a newborn baby trapped in a sewer pipe in China kept quiet about being his mother even as she watched the sensational two-hour rescue unfold, reports said today.

The woman, whose name was not revealed in state media reports, confessed to police a couple of days later when they asked her to undergo a medical checkup after searching her rented room and finding toys and blood-stained toilet paper, the state-run Zhejiang News website said.

The single woman, a tenant in the building, told the police she could not afford an abortion and secretly delivered the child on Saturday afternoon in the toilet. She said the newborn baby slipped into the sewer line and that she alerted her landlord of the trapped baby after she could not pull the child out, Zhejiang News said.

The police initially said they were treating the case of as possible attempted homicide, but it was not immediately clear whether the mother would face any criminal charges.

In China, unwanted pregnancies have been on the rise because of a lack of sex education and of an increasingly lax attitude towards sex. Young men and women often are engaged in unprotected sex, and abortions have become increasingly common.